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Design space and analysis of worm defense strategies

Published: 21 March 2006 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    We give the first systematic investigation of the design space of worm defense system strategies. We accomplish this by providing a taxonomy of defense strategies by abstracting away implementation-dependent and approach-specific details and concentrating on the fundamental properties of each defense category. Our taxonomy and analysis reveals the key parameters for each strategy that determine its effectiveness. We provide a theoretical foundation for understanding how these parameters interact, as well as simulation-based analysis of how these strategies compare as worm defense systems. Finally, we offer recommendations based upon our taxonomy and analysis on which worm defense strategies are most likely to succeed. In particular, we show that a hybrid approach combining Proactive Protection and Reactive Antibody Defense is the most promising approach and can be effective even against the fastest worms such as hitlist worms. Thus, we are the first to demonstrate with theoretic and empirical models which defense strategies will work against the fastest worms such as hitlist worms.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASIACCS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Symposium on Information, computer and communications security
    March 2006
    384 pages
    ISBN:1595932720
    DOI:10.1145/1128817
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 21 March 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. antibody
    2. blacklisting
    3. defense strategy analysis
    4. local containment
    5. proactive protection
    6. worm propagation
    7. worm taxonomy
    8. worms

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    • (2009)A novel contagion-like patch dissemination mechanism against peer-to-peer file-sharing wormsProceedings of the 5th international conference on Information security and cryptology10.5555/1950111.1950141(313-323)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2009
    • (2009)An information-theoretic view of network-aware malware attacksIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2009.20258474:3(530-541)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2009
    • (2009)Defending passive worms in unstructured P2P networks based on healthy file disseminationComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2009.06.00728:7(628-636)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
    • (2008)Improving sensor network immunity under worm attacksProceedings of the 9th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing10.1145/1374618.1374640(149-158)Online publication date: 26-May-2008
    • (2008)Maximizing an Organization's Information Security Posture by Distributedly Assessing and Remedying System Vulnerabilities2008 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control10.1109/ICNSC.2008.4525389(1148-1152)Online publication date: Apr-2008
    • (2007)SweeperACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/1272998.127301041:3(115-128)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2007
    • (2007)SweeperProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 200710.1145/1272996.1273010(115-128)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2007
    • (2007)Misleading and defeating importance-scanning malware propagation2007 Third International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communications Networks and the Workshops - SecureComm 200710.1109/SECCOM.2007.4550340(250-259)Online publication date: Sep-2007
    • (2007)Measuring Network-Aware Worm Spreading AbilityProceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFCOM.2007.22(116-124)Online publication date: 1-May-2007
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